


desire and determination to achieve success.

by pastel_paperclips



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Armitage Hux & Phasma Friendship, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Denial of Feelings, Developing Relationship, Dom/sub Undertones, Dominant Armitage Hux, Gift Fic, Kinda, Kylo Ren Has Issues, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Not Beta Read, Phasma Ships It (Star Wars), Pillow Talk, Smoking, Submissive Kylo Ren, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, cause, they're fucking, where is this in the timeline? who knows :), ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:06:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28170624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pastel_paperclips/pseuds/pastel_paperclips
Summary: Hux is going to rule the universe one day but he may need some help.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 47





	desire and determination to achieve success.

**Author's Note:**

> happy bday bitch!!  
> hope u like ur present xxxxxxxxxx (your socks'll arrive soon too lol)
> 
> the title is just the google definition for ambition

It's a slow day on the bridge and he is surrounded by the familiar noises technology makes when everything is going right. Hux looks over his subordinates and allows himself to wander through some often-pondered thoughts. Unfortunately, most of them seem to revolve around Kylo Ren these days but Hux supposes that that’s only natural with how often the two of them collide.

He considers the man’s powers, the unpredictability of his emotions and his still-hidden face, shrouded in the secrecy of his mask.

His… Hux’s good mood ruptures. _Screaming_.

“Shut up!” Ren yells, slashing his lightsaber through the air and leaving a smoking dent in a prisoner’s shoulder.

“Traitor,” the man wheezes back, blood bubbling over his lips and dripping onto Hux’s deck. “Solos’re cowards, always have been, always will be.”

Hux arches an eyebrow. _Solos?_

The prisoner spits out a glob of blood and it misses Ren’s boots by an inch. Ren, who is strangely not moving, a black pillar in the middle of the silver bridge. The stormtroopers haul him away and he dies seventeen minutes later after Ren interrogates him.

* * *

Later, Hux stands in the entrance of one of the ship’s gymnasiums and lazily watches him train, thrusting and twirling his saber through the air.

“Solo,” he says. 

Ren’s body jolts, missing a step and performing a strangely elegant twist to find his feet again. There’s a muffled ‘tch’ from Ren’s helmet. “ _What_ ,” he seethes, hand twitching like he wants to throw Hux out of the airlock. He probably does.

“Who’s the mother?” Hux asks without fanfare. He’s curious, naturally, and if he finds out soon he could likely rig the bet that’s sure to arise among the senior officers. “Does she know where you are now? Is she proud? Sick? Dead?”

The metal is hard against his back and he already knows that he will be purple from his shoulders to his hips from the sudden impact with the wall.

“Don’t talk about her.” Ren turns and storms out of the gymnasium.

Two minutes after he’s disappeared, the hold on Hux finally loosens and he can slump to the ground. His interest is piqued.

* * *

Ren is tapping his fingers on the railing, watching people and soldiers move about their daily routines. 

“What did Snoke want?”

Tap. Tap.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Hux slants a gaze at him. “Unless you’re finally taking interest in how military expeditions _actually_ work?”

Tap. Tap.

Ren clicks his tongue and it produces a strange metallic noise under the mask, like a crustacean tapping its claws together. “I understand how wars are fought, General.”

“Then you understand that running me through with your lightsaber will not do either of us any favours.”

Ren’s fingers loosen from where they had been gripping his weapon so tightly his gloves had started to creak. His other fingers are still tapping away, a steady beat completely unchanged.

They stand there in silence but for Ren’s tapping until Snoke calls for his protege and Ren almost looks sad to go (or as sad as you can look with your emotions concealed by a mess of metal).

It takes Hux far too long to realise that Ren was tapping out a reflection of Hux’s pulse.

* * *

He’s in a meeting with Snoke when _it_ finally happens. 

Kylo Ren reaches up and unhooks his helmet. Hux’s first thought is something about the colour of his hair shortly followed by a resounding _oh_. It's his eyes more than anything and Ren turns to him, confused.

Snoke leans closer like he’s sniffing the air around them. 

“The stormtrooper quadrants in Thyferra are making progress against the rebels and the planet’s mining produce has been transferred across to our factories on Mechis,” Hux states and Snoke seems happy to take that as it is and move on. 

Hux engages with the discussion, he raises concerns and he plays the role of dutiful servant, all the while internally replaying the moment Ren looked at him, deep brown eyes locked onto ice green.

* * *

There is an awful lot of diplomacy involved in galactic domination and Hux finds himself walking through a festival-painted street with Phasma at his back to negotiate the terms of surrender of a planet he had never even heard of before he’d gotten the memo four hours ago. People are dancing through the city, laughing as they proclaim happiness at whatever they happen to be celebrating. The abundance of flowers suggest a relation to nature but Hux has found that no matter the celebration, no matter the planet, flowers are always likely to be involved. 

Upbeat music crescendos and people spin and lift partners in the air as they beam. He sees one woman in the crowd eye Phasma like she wants to ask her to dance but she is stone-faced, even in the face of all of this joy. His respect for her multiplies, more than it did the day she approached Kylo Ren in a control room and threatened him with castration if he disrupted her carefully maintained sleep schedule with another temper tantrum.

Kylo Ren himself is in the crowd; they’d discussed the importance of understanding what popular opinion was but Hux’s face is splashed over First Order propaganda and Phasma’s blond hair would be too distinctive compared to this planet’s dark tones. So the task fell to Ren, typically masked face, dark hair and all.

Hux glances at him out of the corner of his eye and sees him in a conversation with a local man, a child on the local’s hip. Ren is nodding and the man is gesturing so vividly Hux is in the process of wondering if he will knock the child off when she jumps down and scarpers to a flower bouquet in someone’s windowsill. She grabs a handful and starts to weave them together.

“The central figure is the king,” Phasma says and Hux’s attention returns to his duty. There are three people at the end of the street, two men and one woman, and the man in the middle is stout with a large beard. He’s smiling and there are flowers covering almost every inch of his hair.

His husband is on his left and his wife is on his right. Neither of them are smiling and from the way their guards are slightly angled away from the husband, Hux is confident that he is the one truly in charge. A puppet king, how droll. Perhaps if he provokes Ren enough he will lose control and simply kill him. Either way, watching Ren fight will always be more visually interesting than sitting through hours of pointless peace treaties.

Hux looks back and sees Ren with a small flower chain woven around his wrist and the small girl beaming with pride. Briefly, Hux entertains the idea of this being a hallucination before narrowing his eyes and forcing himself back to the task at hand.

What Ren engages in in his spare time is no concern of his, no matter how fragile his wrist looks adorned in petals.

Hux’s lip curls up scornfully.

He gives it twelve minutes before they start to wilt.

* * *

Kylo Ren is a supernova of emotion, infinitely collapsing in on himself as his fury lights the air around him. He is the type to slip away during the night out of shame, after long evenings of bliss and desire. Hux doesn't place much stock in how often he imagines Ren in situations of bliss and desire.

He is like a wanderer from far off planets, a monarch trapped and waiting for a bold adventurer to save him from the monsters. Hux thinks of that resistance pilot and snorts into his coffee, earning a shocked glance from Mitaka.

He is an annoyance, a constant presence but he is brimming with potential. It is too late to mould him completely to Hux’s ideal but he can be pushed; he is steadily hardening clay and Hux refuses to let this opportunity slip through his grasp.

* * *

“It's an aesthetic appreciation,” he mutters to Phasma in her quarters one day and she nods firmly, reaching across to top up his glass with more brandy.

“Don’t worry,” she promises. “All of the commanding officers have thought about it at least once.”

Hux worries. 

He’s also slightly perturbed at the implication that all of the other commanding officers had seen Kylo Ren without his mask before Hux did.

* * *

Hux is in the gym, scanning through the equipment on his holopad and trying to ascertain why Phasma felt the need to inform him specifically of missing dumbbells when any soldier who could read could do the job.

Ren appears and a group of engineers training together freeze at the sight of him. Everyone on the ship is just a little scared of him. Everyone except Hux. Hux sighs, ready to walk over and tell him to piss off before Ren comes to him.

“Captain Phasma told me that you needed help.”

“She was mistaken,” Hux dismisses, making another checkmark. “You can leave.”

“Their forms are inadequate,” Ren mutters, voice staticky. He’s facing the engineers and curiosity, the same curiosity that left Hux to several sleepless nights of wading through old footage of Han Solo trying to decipher the mystery of Ren’s mother (Hux knows who the likely victim is but something beyond his control is making him wish that it is a nobody, a whore, a servant), curls around him.

“Then _correct_ them,” Hux says, already back to his holopad. Missing dumbbells, really. The entire First Order would crumble without him. Ren stares at him for 14 seconds before huffing and striding away.

“Don’t lean so much on your right!” he yells before the doors shut and one of the engineers drops their weight onto the training room floor, a small sonic boom in the aftermath of Ren’s presence.

* * *

The first time they sleep together Hux is slightly intoxicated and motivated by the sight of Ren taking off his mask again.

It's heated and rushed and over Hux’s desk. Ren loses control and accidentally cracks Hux’s datapad. Ren calls it an accident; Hux is less convinced. 

They’re both left shocked, Hux panting over the back of Ren’s neck. “That was not an utter waste of my time.”

Ren rolls over and they’re facing each other. He swallows and Hux eyes the length of his neck passively. “What does this mean?”

Hux’s eyebrows furrow. “It doesn’t _mean_ anything.”

Ren nods, once. “Good.” 

Hux watches him gather his robes, slip them on and exit. Belatedly, he realises that one of them was lying.

* * *

“I killed my father,” Hux announces one night, tapping out a cigarette on Ren’s bedsheets. The ashes curl up into grey smears against the white.

“How?”

“Poison. Phasma shot his corpse after he died to avoid an investigation. We framed a radar technician and I supervised the execution.”

“You don’t care,” Ren murmurs, facing the ceiling with one hand thrown over his forehead. He’s tired and pliant in all the best ways. Hux could dig his nails into his throat and Ren would moan in pleasure. 

“No.” 

Ren swallows.

* * *

Hux is staring at his holopad at three in the morning in a way reminiscent of his drive during the academy to consume as much knowledge as possible. His screen is open on a report dedicated to Han Solo and a smuggling expedition on Obredaan of illegal arms. He scrolls down and arches an eyebrow. The charges were dropped after Leia Organa, the leader of the New Republic herself, resolved the issue. Exactly _how_ isn't specified but Hux assumes money was exchanged. Honestly, he bypassed four firewalls for this?

There’s a picture attached, the two adults arguing, with a young boy in the background. If the distinctive features weren’t enough to tell him who it is, the lightsaber hanging from his fingertips is.

Hux takes a long sip of his coffee and places his holopad down. Well, that’s that. Kylo Ren is the spawn of Han Solo and Leia Organa, resistance scum. How… curious that he ended up here.

Something is still pushing at him though. It can’t be that simple, though the realisation that Kylo Ren is technically a prince has left him stranded. A pity that his planet was separated into mere atoms before his birth, seeing him in silks would certainly be an experience.

He picks the holopad back up. Leia Organa, adopted ward of the Alderaan monarchy now fierce military leader, glares up at him. Swallowing more of his coffee, he flicks to a report outlining the key figures of the old resistance. 

_Luke Skywalker._

A Jedi, one of the most powerful the galaxy has ever seen. Hux’s brain starts to move, pulling invisible strings together. Kylo Ren is young and Luke Skywalker had a Jedi school of younglings before they were all slaughtered. Kylo Ren is young enough to have been in that Jedi school and who could kill a Jedi but another Jedi? 

Luke Skywalker is Leia Organa’s brother and therefore Kylo Ren’s uncle. The reports of his parentage are vague and clearly censored but more than a few mention speculations of his Jedi parentage to account for his skill. The Jedi order is no more and by Luke’s time, it had crumbled completely. If Hux traces it back by his age though, the last relevant Jedi was likely Obi-Wan Kenobi.

So he searches for Obi-Wan Kenobi, redirects his address to the nowhere planet of Eol Sha, and unlocks a whole series of documents. There's a section on Naboo around the period Luke and Leia should have been born and Hux selects it, curiosity boiling inside of him.

There is a video of Naboo’s leader, long and meandering but Hux supposes that he should remind himself of the planet’s policies - all he knows now is that it's in open rebellion against the First Order. The woman on screen is pretty and when the camera zooms in, she has Kylo Ren’s eyes, deep and soulful.

And there, in the front row staring up at Padmé Amidala with a lovestruck expression and her favour in his hand sitting next to Obi-Wan Kenobi, is a young Darth Vader.

Hux drops his mug.

* * *

“You have an impressive heritage,” Hux traces a finger down his cheek. Ren cracks an eye open to frown at him. 

“As do you.”

“Don’t lie,” Hux digs his nail in and Ren's eyes flutter shut. “Who knows?”

“You and Snoke. And I suppose whoever my parents have told.”

“Parent,” Hux reminds him and Ren shoves him away, stalking out of his quarters.

* * *

Hux is making his way to his quarters a little after midnight when he notices the red light on the blaster training room’s door. Normally, this would be nothing but given the time, Hux is curious enough to open the door with his fingerprint (as the commander of this ship his authority is indisputable and enough to unlock any code).

Ren is facing the training screen, one blaster in his left hand. He hasn’t noticed Hux yet so he settles into the doorway and starts to smile. There are three figures on the screen in various positions and to trigger the next set you need to successfully hit all three.

Ren exhales and shoots. It lands an inch shy of the central figure’s head. He shoots again and it brushes the left one’s leg. In a fight, it would incapacitate someone with the laser’s heat but for a machine it's nothing.

“Your aim is shocking,” he remarks and Ren whirls to him, hand moving to his lightsaber rather than the blaster already in his grip. Hux still isn't used to the novelty of seeing his face in a place that doesn’t involve heat and moaning. 

“This is not my preferred weapon.”

“It's better to be flexible,” Hux says, and from his position six metres behind Ren, he unhooks his blaster and shoots all three figures with perfect precision. The screen ripples to reveal a new selection of figures, one of which is crouched far in the distance, its head merely a dot. Hux shoots all of those too.

Ren rolls his eyes. “When did your father throw you away to the military?”

The jab is nothing compared to the insults spat at him in the academy. “I was trained before I could walk.”

“Even as a bastard?” Ren frowns and Hux forces himself to not react.

“I was my father’s heir. It was imperative that I be able to defend myself and uphold my name.”

“I haven’t met your father,” Ren says suddenly. “But I imagine that you have surpassed your name rather than upheld it.”

Hux blinks and Ren leaves.

* * *

“What’s so important it needs your attention now?” Ren frowns and Hux bats at his forehead absent-mindedly, staring down at his holopad. There have been four conflicts in the last month on a planet called Dantooine and there’s the concern that the First Order’s base may be overrun with rebels.

“An increase in rebel attacks on stormtroopers. Over 50 people are predicted to be involved.”

“I can take care of it,” Ren says.

Hux blinks. “What?”

“I can take care of it,” Ren repeats like Hux simply hadn’t heard him. He moves closer, tugging his lower lip between his teeth. “Now turn it off. The light is distracting me.”

“I hadn’t realised your eyes were so sensitive,” Hux says but he closes the holopad, rolls them over and pushes Ren back into the sheets.

* * *

He does take care of it, and efficiently at that. Hux may need to rethink his previous plan of sacrificing Ren when he inevitably assassinates Snoke and seizes control of the First Order.

* * *

Kylo Ren is a lonely person. He is unfamiliar with the officers on the ship and he avoids meetings with every excuse he can muster. He depended on his uncle, then on Snoke and now, without his master constantly overseeing him he’s…

“Free,” Hux proclaims one night, tapping out another cigarette in that same place on Ren’s bedsheets. He rather likes the idea of leaving his mark on Ren’s rooms the same way there are now purple bite marks littered over Ren’s shoulders. He supposes that if you spend all your life calibrating weapons of mass destruction you also spend all your life destroying the proof of your actions, leaving nothing but empty space, dark voids and asteroid chunks.

Ren wrinkles his nose. He doesn't particularly look like he wants to be free. “It's underwhelming.”

Hux leaves three minutes later.

* * *

“Goodbye,” Ren says, tugging on his boots. He’s about to depart on a mission to apprehend some rebels on a vital mining planet and Hux’s cock already misses him. Hux does, and will, not.

“Do have a safe trip,” Hux murmurs and Ren immediately freezes.

“Did you tell the stormtroopers to kill me?”

Hux turns to him, affronted. “ _No_ , but this conversation is making me wish I had. How tiring your paranoia must be.”

“Snoke says that you must always expect the worst of others.”

“Worst, no,” Hux sighs. “Stupidity, yes. Now get out.”

* * *

The mission is a success.

* * *

Hux was born during the Battle of Yavin on Arkanis to a serving girl and Brendol Hux, a respected military officer within the empire. Kylo Ren was born on a night of political intrigue on Chandrila to two respected figures within the Rebel Alliance. It is a strange disaster that they are even together now. That they know each others’ names. Tastes. 

Hux knows the noise Ren makes when he’s coming undone, how he shakes when he’s bitten and how desperate he grows when he’s been denied.

He takes every moment they share and documents it in his brain. Knowledge is knowledge even if it is used to make Kylo Ren scream in pleasure.

* * *

The two of them have been caught in a fight between some locals and it all began with a drunken insult to the First Order followed by a wobbling punch to Hux’s shoulder. It doesn’t land but it's enough of an excuse for Hux to let out some stress.

Ren’s lightsaber cuts through the air and Hux’s elbow slams into a woman’s nose. 

“Rebel scum,” he mutters, grabbing his blaster and shooting a man through the neck. There’s no need for this to be clean, for it to be pretty. Blood sprays over his glove as he punches a woman in the jaw and across the street he can see red splashed over Ren’s mask. For a moment, he’s worried about it obscuring his vision before remembering that he doesn’t care.

He had to wake up earlier than planned this morning because of a small electrical fire in the lower sectors and he’d spent all day in negotiations about peaceful occupation of the planet even though they were more than happy to place their troops on the other side of the world and ignore the locals’ very presence.

A man bares his teeth, aims his blaster at Hux and shoots.

The laser slices through the air and-

Freezes, hovering in front of Hux’s forehead.

Hux’s gaze snaps to Kylo Ren, crouching by a lamppost with his hand outstretched and shaking slightly. “Move,” he commands.

Hux stares at him for a split-second before yanking the man who’d shot him forward by the collar. He pulls him close enough to stare into his eyes, into his terrified expression, and shoves him into the laser blast’s path.

Ren’s fist clenches and the laser collides with his body, ripping a hole through his chest. He slumps to the ground, the wound immediately cauterised.

Hux walks over to him and extends a hand. He tips Ren’s mask up by the chin and digs his fingers into the opening mechanism. There’s a hiss and he’s unveiled. 

His hair is mussed and he’s flushed, lips parted. 

“General,” he breathes and Hux rubs a gloved thumb across his lips. There’s blood spattered over his leather. Hux stares down at him and Ren swallows. 

“Clean it.”

Ren’s tongue darts down to trail along his hand, lapping at the droplets of blood. It's a not-entirely-unpleasant end to an entirely-unpleasant day.

But because Hux is petty, he sends a calculated missile down to the planet’s surface for target practise and watches it explode. They’ll live without the land.

There are a lot of things that Armitage Hux could live without but he’s starting to think that Kylo Ren might not be one of them.

* * *

They’re on a small outer rim planet, rich in minerals and resources, and a small alien with circles etched into his forehead is ranting about the majesty their Holiness brings as he shows him through their underground caverns. The population is 28,739 and if Hux wanted he could snap his fingers and make Ren massacre them. 

The man in question is trailing ungloved fingers over detailed vanadium sculptures, tracing joints and bones.

Their host follows his gaze and nods sagely. “Our people do not wish to be parted from our Holiness in death so we encase them in our earth and let them flourish in the Holiness’s presence in a way those that are alive can not.”

Ren, naive to the corpses he’s desecrating, doesn’t stop decorating them in his fingerprints. 

“Our people are strongly connected to this land and its bounties but we are also not unaware of the riches that could come from a deal. Even hopeless situations can flourish into something quite beneficial, wouldn’t you agree?”

Hux hums. “Quite.”

* * *

Ren is millions of billions of miles away and Hux is alone in the bridge, allowing himself the privilege of daydreaming when he should be memorising star systems and New Republic military strategies.

He imagines meeting a young Ben Solo at a negotiations table, 15 and overrun with childish fancy. Ben is filled with Jedi calm-

 _No_ , Hux nearly snarls at himself. He would try but there would always be that ocean of feral instinct in his eyes, as poorly concealed as it is now, perhaps more. Perhaps he would slump onto a leather chair and watch his mother discuss peace, all the while imagining the noise a body would make as he tugged his lightsaber free of their flesh.

He is a walking tragedy, a delicate monster, so strong and so shy.

Hux considers the image of Ben in a bar, a tall young man draped over the table in front of what he sees as a First Order officer, someone he’s been taught to stay away from but Ben is young and impulsive, drawn to danger as orphans seem to be drawn to tragedy. He can’t seem to think of Ben Solo as anything other than the bane of his associates’ existence; art imitates life and the Ben Solo of his mind is nothing more than brushstrokes on canvas, a corpse of the past encased in the obsidian of his imagination.

He conjures up another image of another path, the two of them facing each other on opposite sides of the battlefield. The Hux in his mind takes his blaster and slams it into Ben’s head, watching him slump, unconscious. He carries him to an interrogation room and the two of them talk until Hux is the one, the only one worthy of the honour, who persuades Ben to join him. He whispers everything he needs to hear and hands him a mask for when he cannot conceal his emotions. This time, the two of them are united from the start and when they murder Snoke, the galaxy cheers.

A screen beeps and Hux opens his eyes to the present and the efficiency of the ship’s computers and AIs. He is stranded in space, surrounded by competence and people who would die for him. It's a feeling he doesn’t often experience and he _indulges_.

This moment could be perfect. It could be more than but Kylo Ren is millions of billions of miles away and Hux is alone.

* * *

The door to his quarters slides open and Hux’s first thought is always going to be _intruder_ before it is Kylo Ren, masked and looming in his entrance. Hux takes a drag from his cigarette, staring out into the endless night of space. Briefly, he thinks about the old woman he saw as a child with a hole in her throat from the tobacco. It whistled when the wind got too strong. The wind was always too strong on Arkanis.

“You called for me?” Ren says but Hux’s gaze doesn’t waver. There’s a faint hiss followed by the clink of metal and Hux knows that Ren has bared himself to him. “General?”

There’s the movement of fabric and Hux knows that Ren is removing his outer robe. The presence of his associate at his back is no longer foreign but it isn’t quite familiar either. Notable, in its banality.

“Are you going to fuck me?” Ren asks, hands already on the hem of his shirt. Hux observes the strip of pale skin. 

He turns back to the window, examining the silver dots with the precision of a newly furbished med-droid. “No,” he says simply and takes another drag.

“Then _why_ am I here?” Ren complains, hands drifting awkwardly down to hover between his thighs and his hips. Hux doesn't answer.

After a few minutes of Ren’s childish huffs and fidgeting, he joins him by the window. 

They don’t speak and if Hux were a foolish man, one who believed in companionship and trust, he would have called it pleasant.

* * *

Ren has passed out and Hux is so close to shaking him awake before he remembers that the heating in his quarters is broken because of one of Ren’s tantrums in the maintenance rooms. 

Unbidden, his mind finds an image of Ren in the snow, red blood blooming over the white, black hair raven and wavy, soft under his touch as Ren looks up at him, desperate, yearning. He is a predator gazing down at a deer already wounded in his trap and he is in control.

Slowly, he lies down, careful to separate every part of his body from Ren.

Predictably, they wake up entangled like two strings unable to ever be fully separated again.

* * *

Their tectonic plates have shifted and Hux cannot wait for the earth to quake under his feet.

* * *

Ren is watching him, as is his wont, and his head is tilted at such an angle his hair is slipping over one shoulder in a waterfall of black. The sheets are cold under them.

“I would carve up the night for you,” Hux whispers, tongue loosened and unravelling from the liquor. “I would drape you in stars to make your eyes sparkle, I would drown you in darkness to overwhelm any urge that would take you from me.”

Ren swallows and Hux eyes the length of his neck, long and pale. Ripe for bruising, strangling, _owning_. He’s not strong enough to stop the fantasy of a thick leather collar around the skin, a delicate chain taut in Hux’s hand.

“You want me to be yours,” Ren whispers back.

“I want you to be more than that.”

The bottle is empty on the small circular table and Ren had nothing but a breath of the liquor during a deep kiss as he came.

“You want…” Ren’s brow furrow. There’s a strange sensation in Hux’s thoughts like someone is ghosting their fingers over his mind. “You want a confidante. An equal. A lover. Who would ever be so worthy?”

Hux thinks of the destruction he wishes to practise and finetune and feels the air around him crackle like a loose wire against his skin. Ren blinks lazily, eyelashes framing his eyes. They’re dark, the echoes of the depths of space, a black hole tugging Hux in again and again. If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, Ren's soul must be stunning.

He raises a hand and tangles it in Ren’s hair, not hard, not pulling, but present. He winds the strands around his fingers and imagines Ren at his feet. His associate tries to conceal a smirk but Hux has already seen the twitch of his lips. He really is a waterfall, constantly eroding until he will fall in on himself, a gorge in the wake of his own emotions. Hux thinks that all the tears Ren has ever cried could fill a galaxy of stars.

“I suppose you’ll do.” The words spill over his lips like blood.

* * *

One night, half-delirious with sleep, Hux reaches across, takes Ren's hand in his and says rather frankly: “Once, I hated you so much I would have died for it.”

Hux can almost see Ren go through every social interaction he’s experienced to find an appropriate response. After a few minutes of a strange not-quite-uncomfortable silence, he simply rolls over, taking Hux’s hand with him.

* * *

“You want to be Supreme Leader,” Ren whispers like Snoke might hear them. Hux finds he doesn’t care either way.

“No,” he takes a pointed step forward and, to his delight, Ren stumbles back, dark eyes wide. “I want to be _Emperor_.”

Ren exhales shakily and the sound of it makes Hux stand straighter, stand prouder. “You could. If you- if you really tried- wanted-”

He stumbles over his words and Hux’s lips curl upwards into a cold smile. He has been by Hux’s side for years yet he is unaware of just how important he is.

“You will help.”

Ren’s lips part on an inhale. He's staring at him, deep brown eyes locked onto ice green. He nods. 

Such a small movement promises so much.

The universe will throw itself at their feet.

**Author's Note:**

> fellas, is it gay to find your rival visually interesting?
> 
> i don't know if u noticed but descriptions are kinda my favourite thing in the whole world lol
> 
> uh, kudos and comment??


End file.
